Transcribed from the 1888 Cassell & Company edition byDavid Price,
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.
Discourses on Satire
AND ON
Epic Poetry.
BY
JOHN DRYDEN.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
LONDON, PARIS,NEW YORK &MELBOURNE.
1888.
INTRODUCTION.
Dryden’s discourses uponSatire and Epic Poetry belong to the latter years of his life,and represent maturer thought than is to be found in his“Essay of Dramatic Poesie.” That essay,published in 1667, draws its chief interest from the time when itwas written. A Dutch fleet was at the mouth of theThames. Dryden represents himself taking a boat down theriver with three friends, one of them his brother-in-law SirRobert Howard, another Sir Charles Sedley, and another CharlesSackville Lord Buckhurst to whom, as Earl of Dorset, the“Discourse of Satire” is inscribed. They godown the river to hear the guns at sea, and judge by the soundwhether the Dutch fleet be advancing or retreating. On theway they talk of the plague of Odes that will follow an Englishvictory; their talk of verse proceeds to plays, with particularattention to a question that had been specially argued before thepublic between Dryden and his brother-in-law Sir RobertHoward. The question touched the use of blank verse in thedrama. Dryden had decided against it as a worthlessmeasure, and the chief feature of the Essay, which was written indialogue, was its support of Dryden’s argument. Butin that year (1667) “Paradise Lost” was published,and Milton’s blank verse was the death of Dryden’stheories. After a few years Dryden recanted hiserror. The “Essay of Dramatic Poesie” isinteresting as a setting forth in 1667 of mistaken criticalopinions which were at that time in the ascendant, but had notvery long to live. Dryden always wrote good masculineprose, and all his critical essays are good reading as pieces ofEnglish. His “Essay of Dramatic Poesie” is goodreading as illustrative of the weakness of our literature in thedays of the influence of France after the Restoration. Theessays on Satire and on Epic Poetry represent also the influenceof the French critical school, but represent it in a larger way,with indications of its strength as well as of itsweakness. They represent also Dryden himself with a ripermind covering a larger field of thought, and showing abundantlythe strength and independence of his own critical judgment, whilehe cites familiarly and frequently the critics, little rememberedand less cared for now, who then passed for the arbiters oftaste.
If English literature were really taught in schools, and theeldest boys had received training that brought them in their lastschool-year to a knowledge of the changes of intellectual fashionthat set their outward mark upon successive periods, there is noprose writing of Dryden that could be used by a teacher moreinstructively than these Discourses on Satire and on EpicPoetry. They illustrate abundantly both Dryden and hist